Phew!

Supposedly so much time on my hands and still, no time to get anything done!

As we are now on our third week in Sweden it is dawning on all of us that we are not going back, that at the moment we actually have no idea of where we are going. Yes, we know which country and city but not much more than that. We also do not know when we are leaving and where we will stay when we reach our destination. Or when we get our stuff, currently in a container in storage in Los Angeles.
I can handle this, it is not the ideal living situation but I know that once we get there, and get our belongings, it will be good and normal and routinely again. The kids...the kids are sad and wish to go back to Arizona. Any small argument about stupid things like you have to wear long pants when it's raining or you will be cold ends in tears and: "I just want to go back to Arizona...".
Add in some parental guilt about uprooting our children and you have an ideal living situation.

On our treks into the city for our health certificate (three days of traveling on bus/tram/subway) and other excursions, I've seen the "new" Sweden. I left 15 years ago and sure, I've visited every year; enjoyed the city life at least once every summer and experienced the glory of summer Stockholm. Not in a long time have I had to use public transportation as much as this year, visited clinics and laboratories and waited in line to get my own, and my family's, chest x-ray done. We've used public transport, as mentioned, which has improved tremendously. It's easy, cheap and gets you from a to b efficiently and without major mishaps. We have seen how the once so very monochromatic Stockholm has changed, in a good way. There are people of different colors and cultures who belong (more than I do) and take their place. Different languages are spoken on buses and subways and not by tourists only.

In one area though, and I'm really sorry to have to point this out, it seems to have gone backwards.

Question: What is the one thing that all living creatures have to do? Not sleeping nor eating.

Yes! Going to the bathroom. We all do it, there's no way around it. Yet, in Stockholm there is not only almost impossible to find a public bathroom; when you do - you have to pay for it! Even in restaurants, EVEN at McDonalds. And if you do not have the right coin, because the machine on the door does of course not accept credit cards and if you put the right amount of money in but in the wrong denomination, it will take your money but NOT let you into the bathroom! So what to do when you have a six 1/2 year old with you who cannot hold it a second longer and you can't get in? Pee in the sink? Well lucky us who were saved by a German tourist and later by a very nice lady from another part of the country (yes, she had to go again). Is there any wonder that people pee in the elevators and in back alleys? That they risk their lives in the subway tunnels and  develop urinary tract infections? Even in the movie theater when you've been sitting in the dark for at least 1 1/2 hours drinking soda and eating popcorn, you need a code to use the bathroom. And they are not even clean!
Are people really that greedy? Or are Swedish people really that bad at using the bathroom, leaving them so stinky and smelly that there is no use having public restrooms? I understand if you don't want people sleeping and doing drugs in public bathrooms but there's just gotta be a way to deal with this.

In China, I developed the most amazing bladder. I could go for a day without going. Not because there were no public restrooms around, there were plenty, but they were just a bit stinky and actually quite hard to figure out how to use. In the west, going to the bathroom is not a social event, most people prefer to go in private (unless you're in a bar or restaurants with girl friends of course), in China it was the opposite. There were a few variations on the layout of the public bathrooms, some had stalls (usually without doors) and some where just an open space. Sometimes there were a few grooves, parallel on the floor, sometimes just an flat surface, slightly tilted to assure that all the end product ended up where it should. In department stores there were usually restrooms in one corner of every store; very easy to detect because of the scent, but they were there, and they were free!

My mom is an expert on public restrooms, she really should write a guide book on the subject. So far, America is the true winner with Singapore as number two. She never visited in Japan, a pity, they would surely win with their heated toilet seats and muffling sounds of the ocean or birds singing and no use for toilet paper even; a nice douche, cold or warm, and a puff or nice warm air will do nicely.
Those Japanese, they sure know how to do it.